Review
Played on: PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 4 Pro
Released: 2017
Admittedly, I’ve been disconnected from the Gran Turismo franchise for years. Although I’ve probably tried them all, my last main playthrough was Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 back in 2005. I shifted over to the Forza Motorsport series with FM2, review here, and stayed there for my simulator fix on console thereafter.
Although my main platform for the eighth generation began with a PS4, I moved back over to Xbox again when the Xbox One X arrived. Thus, many of the later PS4 releases missed my attention. That said, alongside games like Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn, I ended up picking up Gran Turismo Sport.
Since then, I've sporadically played it, but having recently been handed a PS4 Pro from a friend, I decide to return to it at a healthier resolution than my old PS4. With a healthy bump from 1080p to 1800p, I was ready to put in the last effort to completing at least a good chunk of the race before moving on to GT7!
Let’s take it out for a spin!
I’m not overall positive to the smaller Gran Turismo releases between the main numbered series; be it prologues or basically just tech demos. GT Sport began life as an online-only competitive racer, but with the backlash of reviews it added a lot more flesh to the bone through updates. It would essentially work as a stopgap before Polyphony finished their next main release. GT Sport, released in 2017, is the fundament on which 2022's Gran Turismo 7 was built on. I'll come back to GT7 at a later date.
What GT Sport marks is a significant overhaul of the series, built from the feedback of the PS3 titles; GT5 & GT6. These releases caught criticism as they felt like they were built on an old physics engine, blending new car models with ones dating all the way back to the PS2 and the focus of development was all over the place. Polyphony seemed to have the freedom from Sony to go crazy with insane quantity in content; driving on the moon or a wooden carriage come to mind. Yet, they had insane minor detail in things that didn't matter and hampered the framerate on the complicated PS3 hardware.
GT Sport, on the other hand, feels fresh and renewed both in visuals and physics. With a less ambitious goal; focusing in on competitive play versus covering every aspect of racing. "Sport" in the title refers to the online racing part, making GT an E-sport at a serious level.
This, however, was not my personal interest when playing it and besides; the online servers have been shut down in replacement for GT7. So, be aware that GT Sport is missing the online features if you play it these days, a paradox considering it launched without the singleplayer content back in 2017!
Sport doesn’t offer a traditional GT campaign, although it does offer certain parts of that experience. There's a fair share of cars, albeit in a smaller number than we’re used to from earlier GT and Forza Motorport releases, there are licenses to obtain, a ton of time trail challenges and a series of cups to complete.
Although the latter offers many classes of races to partake in, it feels like it lacks some sort of overall goal. Like it's just checkboxes that can be ticked off to fill a progression pie chart. This structure worked for the arcade mode in old GT titles, but here it feels like an afterthought. They basically added a campaign of some sort after they learnt that online racing alone wasn't going to cut it for such a massive selling franchise.
Progression lacks incentive to keep the player interested, there's a slow grind for money to buy cars and levelling up your driver. There’s a balance to be made on progression and GT Sport has opted for a hardcore system, appealing mainly to GT fans. The result is a magnitude of races, but they lead to nothing. Even the cup menus don't show a gold emblem if all the underlying races have been won.
That said, there's a healthy set of racetracks on offer and a varied selection of car types to play around with. You can spend literally hours on end completing them all, but they have the questionable layout like Forza Motorsport 5 did; cups are just single races, not a cumulative score through a championship. Completionists will love the structure, but it feels far from the Gran Turismo map structure of the old releases.
As usual it's nice to see that the various cups span a large variety of vehicle types, from small from engine hatchbacks to roaring GT3 engines, even rally races. Again, there's not that many cars to choose between for each type and weirdly enough they rarely limit the car power. Thus, I can participate in early, Sunday Cup, races with some insanely powered car to beat them all.
Visually it's a neat looking racer, reminding myself this is in the timeline of Forza Motorsport 6 and 7, and it's very comparable to those two titles. There's a sharpness and detail on cars, tarmac and environments, but perhaps a little sterile. Lighting is extremely well done, night races are especially stunning, with an excellent usage of HDR. The way the light and car bodies look in various lighting really is done in a way that looks amazing.
Performance is good, targeting and hitting 60fps essentially all the time. Sadly, not completely locked like the Forza Motorsport series, another strange omission considering the competitive online nature this release is aiming for. mostly noticeable when the screen is crowded with cars and effects. Most of the time it’s fine though and nowhere near the bad performance of the PS3 GT titles.
I played a lot of the game on a base PS4, with impressively decent visuals at 1080p. However, later in my playthrough a friend gave me a PS4 Pro and as such I could enjoy it at 1800p. It makes a lot of difference to bring the resolution to a far less jaggy and sharper picture on the Pro. It especially helps for clarity in the distance!
Car control has a solid feel on the controller. While it's not up to Forza standard of controller optimisation, it feels a tad twitchy on the turning, but I'm sure on a steering wheel setup its excellent. Once again GT balances the high realism, with a console friendly approach cleverly. It's neat to see that both GT and Forza are ahead of the third-party competition on consoles when it comes to handling and visuals.
Camera angels are weird. Cockpit view is solid, albeit a low field of view so remember to change it, for every single car. Bumper cam works fine but is extremely low and has a forced rear view mirror. External cameras are a mess. The outside view feels like its glued on a stick behind the car, giving the sensation of the car standing still and the road moving around it. The fourth view is seemingly a bonnet view, but on most cars it's lazily set high up on the roof.
Car sounds are heavily improved with a large variety in each car models and a pleasing powerful sound to high performance engines. There're satisfying pops from exhaust pipes and growling of V8 engines. There's a more believable screeching sound to tires this time around, long gone are the wailing cats from earlier GTs and there's a distinct surround sound as cars pass by or you hit the curve on either side. Music is still some weird funky jazz stuff.
At the end of the day, I’m still a bit perplexed that with the massive popularity and sales of the series, Polyphony are allowed so much development time for a title that released only for a selected hardcore audience of online racers. Lacking any campaign content, which they later patched in. It also would take another five years before GT7 saw the light of day.
It lacks the fundamentals to make a complete GT experience come to life with its added campaign, not shaking the feeling of being an afterthought to an online designed experience. Yet, at the same it offers a fair share of content to play on your own, and while its release is redundant thanks to GT7, I feel GT Sport wasn't a bad attempt at bringing the series forward a generation with considerable updates to visuals and physics.
There’s a narrower but much needed focus on delivering a specific racing experience here, which suits Polyphony better. Rather than wandering off into endless content and rabbit holes of detail not needed. I'd pick up GT7 over this these days, but if you want to do some completions of racers it still looks very decent, especially on a PS4 Pro!
